Hamlet Two Blog

Hamlet 2 Blog

After the death of the former king, Claudius inherits the throne. In his first monologue he claims to be grieving his brother’s death, yet he displays no signs of actual grief: “we with wisest sorrow think on him / Together with remembrance of ourselves” (I.ii. 6-7). Claudius states here that he must think of himself in addition to mourning his brother. Claudius is also very comfortable with the idea of marrying his brother’s wife. He casually refers to her as “our sometime sister, now our queen” (I.ii. 8). This kind of closeness could imply that they have had feelings for each other for a long time. Claudius claims that this marriage is to counteract the sadness about the former king and help the country adjust itself from one rule to other, since Gertrude is the “jointress” (I.ii. 9) that connects the two kings. Later, Claudius refers to Hamlet as his son, which Hamlet coolly replies to with “A little more than kin and less than kind” (I.ii. 65). This brief exchange shows that while they are closely related, they do not get along and their whole relationship is tense and strained. Soon after, Claudius criticizes Hamlet for still mourning his father’s death. Claudius says that all sons have lost their fathers and that staying in mourning “shows a will most incorrect to Heaven” (I.ii. 95). He implies that this will lead to bad things and straying from the path of God. Claudius then goes on to reference the first human death, which was Abel, who was killed by his brother Cain. This reference unsuccessfully encourages Hamlet to move on and is ironic since Cain caused the death of his brother, implying that Claudius also killed his brother. Following this monologue, Claudius then tells Hamlet that he is not allowed to return to school in Wittenberg, but earlier in the scene Claudius agrees to let Laertes return to France. It is strange that Claudius would want to keep Hamlet around since they do not get along well and Hamlet could potentially be a threat to Claudius since Hamlet is the Previous king’s son. This suggests that Claudius has a purpose for keeping Hamlet around, possibly that he intends to kill Hamlet to secure his place as ruler. Claudius’s words and actions throughout act I scene ii show that he wants to keep the appearance of a good ruler, but a darker side to him keeps emerging, displaying his evil intentions.

The ghost seemingly of Hamlet’s father appears in the first scene of the play during the watch of Barnardo, Marcellus, and Horatio. When the men see it, they keep saying that the apparition looks like the king: “In the same figure like the King that’s dead” (I.i. 43).  However, they do not say that it is the king because it does not act like the king since it is silent and hardly interacts with them. When the ghost leaves for the first time, Horatio says, “This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (I.i. 71). The “this” Horatio refers to is both the appearance of the dead king’s likeness and the state it is in, which is the same outfit the king wore when he battled the King of Norway. Horatio feels that this is an ominous sign that something horrible will happen in the near future, such as another war with Norway. The ghost features many common characteristics of spirits. For example, its actions are limited, it appears at night, and it must leave as the sun rises. When it comes again in Hamlet’s presence, Hamlet says, “Be thou spirit of health or goblin damned” (I.iv. 40). Hamlet doubts whether the ghost is truly his father’s spirit or some type of monster. He therefore also doubts whether it can be trusted and questions its intentions. Shakespeare’s inclusion of a ghost in this play is very significant and relates to that previous quote. Hamlet was written at a time when England and the rest of Europe were undergoing the Protestant Reformation, when a massive group of Christians broke from the Catholic Church and formed their own sect. England specifically had a very confusing time during this period. The country was somewhat Protestant but mostly Catholic under Henry VIII, Protestant under Edward VI, Catholic under Mary I, and finally Protestant under Elizabeth I. The English had undergone a long period of constantly reevaluating their beliefs. One such belief is the existence of Purgatory. The Catholics believed in it, while the Protestants did not. Hamlet, who is most likely Protestant since he studied at Wittenberg, is forced to question what the spirit really is and then doubt his own Protestant beliefs about the nonexistence Purgatory when he sees a being seemingly from Purgatory. The question Hamlet poses to the ghost represents the English transition from Catholicism to Protestantism because it shows confusion over what to believe as there are two contrasting ideas that could both potentially be correct. The ghost in Hamlet is both an omen of death and war and a representation of the religious shifts within England because the characters worry about the reason for its appearance and questions what it is and from whence it came.